Businesses, families and individuals often ship photographs, compact discs, floppy disks, video tapes, and other small items. Many of these items are easily damaged by folding or the like encountered in shipping. Therefore, the shipper will package the item in a box made from cardboard or the like. Business organizations which do a large volume of shipping purchase mailing containers specifically sized to accommodate compact discs, floppy disks and the like. Such containers come in cartons containing a number of mailing containers. Individuals who do not mail photos or compact discs often enough to justify buying numerous containers, usually proceed otherwise. Compact discs may be mailed in padded envelopes which do not provide the protection one gets from a box. Otherwise, an individual may use a large box found around the house stuffed with crumpled newspaper. This increases mailing costs. This approach also does not provide maximum protection for the items being shipped.
Dedicated packaging for shipping as described above is sold as a product. Usually several packages are contained within a carton or other container upon which required product information can be placed. Thus, when one sells a product one must put the product identity on the container, put the distributor's name on the container, apply a UPC bar code for use at retail and otherwise identify the product being sold. It is desirable to have this information on the packaging for the product, not on the product itself. This is true for mailing cartons and also holds true for gift packages and the like. In both instances, the shipper or gift giver will want his name or the name of the recipient to be on the product not the name of the person who made or distributed the product. In mailing and shipping, the post office and some commercial shippers apply bar codes to the package for use in routing. The presence of a UPC bar code used in retail would then result in two bar codes, one used only in retailing and one used in routing on the package.
In the past, when shipping products have been packaged for consumer use, the product count in a particular container is kept low. The normal consumer does not wish to buy 10 shipping containers when he only intends to use one or two. He will simply have to throw away or store the other eight. Small product count per package increased costs. The cost of packaging could not be divided among a large number of products as is the case with commercial quantities of 10 or 20. Thus, the consumer price was higher to account for the high per unit packaging cost.